Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Archives for December 13, 2011

For the next few daysat leastRifftides will be in semi-suspension while I face down a couple of deadlines. I should be able to tell you sometime next week about the more urgent one. In the meantime, the staff will continue to monitor and post your comments. When possible, I will contribute a tidbit or two, starting now.
Early this month, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz rebroadcast her 2006 program with Bud Shank (1926-2009). She kept marveling that the two had never before met, … [Read more...]

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland and Washington, DC. His writing about jazz has paralleled his life in journalism... [Read More]

Rifftides

A winner of the Blog Of The Year award of the international Jazz Journalists Association. Rifftides is founded on Doug's conviction that musicians and listeners who embrace and understand jazz have interests that run deep, wide and beyond jazz. Music is its principal concern, but the blog reaches past... Read More...

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Doug’s Picks

Wolfgang Muthspiel, Rising Grace (ECM) The Austrian Guitarist Muthspiel is the leader, but he and his sidemen are so wrapped together in the music on Rising Grace that they might have been billed as a collective. Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, pianist Brad Mehldau, bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Brian Blade share with Muthspiel a commitment to […]

George Cables, The George Cables Songbook (High Note) As he awaits news about a second kidney transplant, health problems haven’t affected Cables’ fleetness and lyricism at the piano. Most of the compositions here are new, although his celebrated “Think On Me” dates to 1968 and “The Dark The Light” to 1975. “Think On Me” has […]

Bill Frisell, When You Wish Upon A Star (Okeh) Much of guitarist Frisell’s early exposure to music was by way of the sound tracks of motion pictures and television programs. His versions of some of that music show up on several of his albums. When You Wish Upon A Star takes his fascination a long […]

Tom Harrell, Something Gold, Something Blue (High Note) Harrell’s front-line partners in this stimulating venture are fellow trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the adventuresome guitarist Charles Altura, each more than three decades younger than the leader. They blend and contrast through eight Harrell compositions and a standard song. There is nothing in the music to indicate […]

Nick Sanders & Logan Strosahl, Janus (Sunnyside) Collaborators since their student days at the New England Conservatory nearly a decade ago, pianist Sanders and saxophonist Strosahl are dedicated to tradition and improvisation. Making the two qualities inseparable, they take listeners on an excursion through music as old as the dance rhythm of the Allemande, as […]